Everyday Idioms 1: For Reference and Practice

By Ronald E. Feare

Everyday Idioms One and Two bring the challenge of learning typical American English expressions within any student s reach. Each book presents over 1,200 idioms within tightly organized semantic categories. No other idiom texts give as comprehensive coverage of essential American idioms or make them as accessible to students.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0201834081
• ISBN13: 9780201834086
• Release Date: March 1996
• Publisher: Pearson Education ESL
• Length: 184 Pages
• Weight: 0.96 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 8.5" x 10.8"

Customer Reviews

Fifty Rooms in an Everyday House

Everyday Idioms for Reference and Practice, Bk. 1, is like a large multi-leveled old American house with fifty rooms. And in each of the rooms, or in each Unit of the textbook (three pages each, with definitions, sentences, and a couple of exercises, then some conversational practice questions) an international student is provided with approximately 15 good American idioms. That's 750 idioms in all, more or less, a worthy sum. Shopping, Small Talk, Telephone, Weather, Housekeeping, Vacationing, Relaxing, Family, School, In the Morning, In the Evening, and a few others -- these are the ground floors to the textbook (more or less at the beginning) and they tend to lend a view to the more physical areas of American experience. But then the rooms go up the stairs, so to speak, and then the tour of the house moves on to other aspects of the American experience of less a physical, but more a psychological nature, like Ability and Experience, Understanding, Time, Difficulty and Ease, Happiness and Sadness, and on and on. On the plus side, there are lots and lots of idioms here, each made a little easier to understand by being put into context of a particular environment. On the negative side, the same idioms in this textbook may appear in two or three different units of the house, each with a somewhat different definition. Another debit is that the textbook was written in 1993, and so an occasional idiom like 'hang up,' when referring to the telephone, has become almost obsolete nowadays in an age of the cell phone, which one turns on/off. Another handful of idioms (about 35 in all) are obscure, in my opinion. All in all, the book is useful, and has been designed in very flexible ways.

A useful Book!

This is a useful book for the non-American people, like me, to learn how American use these daily phrases. The Phrases showed on this book can be heard every day and have high frequencies. I really like this book. It helps me understant what my American classmates talk and the speech which my professor addressed in the classroom.

A Good Solid Book of Really Used Idioms

I've found that quite a few books contain idioms that are only used in parts of the U.S., or are out-of-date or unusual. One of my international graduate students commented that she constantly saw the idioms she had learned in print- these are really the idioms that are popular and taken for granted. I only wish that there had been more information about how to use the idioms correctly in context; more definition of the socio-linguistic limits.